Schelling on the Possibility of Evil: Rendering Pantheism ...

G. Anthony Bruno*

Schelling on the Possibility of Evil:Rendering Pantheism, Freedom,and Time Consistent

https://doi.org/10.1515/sats-2017-0013

Abstract: German idealism stems in large part from Fichte’s response to adilemma involving the concepts of pantheism, freedom, and time: time is theform of the determination of modes of substance, as held by a pantheistic or“dogmatic” person, or the form of acts generated by human freedom, as held byan idealistic person. Fichte solves the dilemma by refuting dogmatism anddeducing time from idealism’s first principle. But his diagnosis is more porten-tous: by casting the lemmas in terms of person-types, he unintentionally invitesSchelling’s philosophical rethinking of personality. In his middle period,Schelling argues for the consistency of the concepts of pantheism, freedom,and time, claiming that it depends on a “good” as opposed to “evil’ personality.However, since on his view personality is an absolute or originally undecidedcapacity for good and evil, the trio’s consistency is entirely contingent. In §1,I trace Fichte’s resolution of the dilemma. In §§2–3, I reconstruct Schelling’sarguments for consistency from the Freiheitsschrift and Weltalter, texts writtenjust a few years apart. In §4, I allay a Kantian worry that this consistency reliesproblematically on the liberty of indifference or Willkür.

Keywords: dogmatism, evil, Fichte, freedom, nihilism, pantheism, personality,Schelling, time, unconsciousness

German idealism stems in large part from Fichte’s response, during the periodof the Jena Wissenschaftslehre, to a perceived dilemma involving the concepts ofpantheism, freedom, and time. According to this dilemma, time is the form ofthe infinite determination of a mode of substance, as is held by the pantheisticor what he calls “dogmatic” person, or it is the form of the acts generated byhuman freedom, as held by an idealistic person. Fichte solves the dilemma byespousing an idealism that is capable of refuting pantheism and by deducingtime from idealism’s first principle. I want to suggest that his diagnosis of the

*Corresponding author: G. Anthony Bruno, McGill University, Department of Philosophy,Montreal, Canada, E-mail: [email protected]

sats 2017; 18(1): 1–18

Authenticated | [email protected] author's copyDownload Date | 9/10/17 4:12 AM

dilemma is more portentous than his solution, for it is by casting the lemmas interms of person-types that Fichte unintentionally invites Schelling’s philosophi-cal rethinking of personality.

The first lemma depends, according to Fichte, on a dogmatist’s refusal toaffirm her self-sufficiency. Debasing her humanity yet unable to shirk hercommitment to the pursuit of ends, she generates the inconsistency betweenfreedom and time. It is the result of a person-type marked by bad faith1 or evil.2

As early as the “Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism”, Schellingrejects Fichte’s understanding of this trio of concepts and, in his middle period,accounts for the possibility of their consistency. In Philosophical Investigationsinto the Essence of Human Freedom (Freiheitsschrift), he argues that pantheism,understood as a system of nature, is impossible unless it is grounded in free-dom, while, in the Ages of the World (Weltalter), he argues that freedom is thetime—specifically, the “transcendental past”—that conditions the possibility ofany such system. Combining these arguments, taken from texts written just afew years apart, we find a view in which pantheism is the consequent of ananterior act of freedom—a view, that is, in which the trio of concepts are not onlyconsistent, but mutually dependent.

Schelling claims, furthermore, that their consistency depends on personal-ity, where personality is cast in terms of an originally undecided capacity forwilling good and evil. As he says in the second draft of the Weltalter, “personalI-hood” is “the ground” of the being of beings (Schelling and Žižek 1997, 170).On this view, personality can express itself as evil—i.e. an anxious disavowal ofone’s role in conditioning the possibility of a system of nature—or as good—i.e.an authentic recognition of that role. An evil will severs condition from condi-tioned, disowning its hand in nature’s intelligibility. It is only by resisting evilthat one can generate the consistency among pantheism, freedom, and time.This requires a personality devoid of what in the Freiheitsschrift Schelling calls“impetuosity” and “arrogance” (SW I/7, 360). Hence, as we will see, even ifFichte fails to detect a real dilemma, his diagnosis of person-types opens

1 See Fichte: “A person who has faith in himself cannot accept any variety of dogmatism orfatalism” (GA IV/2, 17).2 See Fichte: “an act of freedom is purely and simply because it is, and it is what is absolutelyprimary, something that cannot be connected to anything else and cannot be explained on thebasis of anything else. Only if one fails to take this into account does one encounter thosedifficulties that so many people encounter when they arrive at this point [ … ] To be sure, it canbe predicted and comprehended that a human being will remain at the lower points ofreflection for a long time, perhaps even for his entire life, since there is absolutely nothingthat drives him higher, and experience confirms that the former is at least generally the case. Tothis extent, evil is inborn in human beings” (SW IV, 182).

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conceptual space for Schelling to conceive of the radical contingency of will—the unprethinkable ground of the being of beings. We will see, moreover, thatwhereas Fichte ascribes evil to dogmatism,3 Schelling’s novel conception of evildenotes our capacity to deny, not simply our self-sufficiency, but our groundingresponsibility for the philosophical systems we endorse.

In §1, I trace Fichte’s resolution of the apparent dilemma. In §§2–3,I reconstruct Schelling’s arguments for the consistency of the concepts ofpantheism, freedom, and time from the Freiheitsschrift and Weltalter. In §4, Iallay a Kantian worry that this consistency problematically relies on the libertyof indifference or Willkür.

§1It is during the pantheism controversy sparked by Jacobi that Fichte detects

a dilemma: either time is the form of the infinite determination of a mode ofsubstance or it is the form of the acts generated by human freedom. Jacobiregisters the first lemma in Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to HerrMoses Mendelssohn. On his reading, a mode’s determination by an endless chainof preceding efficient causes constitutes a temporal series in which that mode isfixed, one among qualitatively identical time-phases. Jacobi recounts his child-hood reaction to this idea: “That extraordinary [view] was a representation ofendless duration, quite independent of any religious concept. At the said age,while I was pondering on eternity a parte ante, it suddenly came over me withsuch clarity, and seized me with such violence, that I gave out a loud cry and fellinto a kind of swoon […] The thought of annihilation, which had always beendreadful to me, now became even more dreadful, nor could I bear the vision ofan eternal forward duration any better” (Jacobi 1994, 362). Jacobi’s worry is thatif time is the form of the infinite determination of modes, that is, if, as Spinozaholds, a mode is preceded and succeeded by an endless causal series, then theconcept of time is inconsistent with that of human freedom.

Why does Jacobi identify this threat with “annihilation”? What death resultsif, with Spinoza, we solve the dilemma by banishing the concept of humanfreedom? Consider Jacobi’s conception of life in David Hume on Faith, orIdealism and Realism: “All truly actual things are individuals or singular things,and, as such, they are living beings (principia perceptiva et activa)” (Jacobi 1994,317–8). By this definition, living beings are distinguished, not by efficientcauses, but by final causes, that is, as beings that contain the principle that

3 See Fichte: “We have explained the evil in human beings as follows: anyone who is supposedto be able to be called a human being has to achieve a consciousness of himself. This demandsnothing more than that he become conscious of the freedom that is involved in his choice ofactions” (SW IV, 198).

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guides their action toward their proper ends. It is only because they contain thisprinciple that such beings are free. Hence Jacobi’s remark to Lessing regardingSpinoza’s pantheism: “If there are only efficient, but no final, causes, then theonly function that the faculty of thought has in the whole of nature is that ofobserver; its proper business is to accompany the mechanism of the efficientcauses” (Jacobi 1994, 189). The mechanism that is entailed by Spinozism anni-hilates living beings, that is, beings capable of striving freely toward ends. Thisis why, on Jacobi’s view, pantheism annihilates free beings.

The nihilistic threat posed by this lemma motivates Fichte to refutepantheism, under the label “dogmatism”, and to vindicate the secondlemma, under the banner of transcendental idealism. He gives an indirectrefutation of dogmatism in Attempt at a New Presentation of theWissenschaftslehre. There, Fichte defines philosophy’s “first task” as thesearch for the absolute ground of experience (SW I, 423). The options inthis search are the Not-I or substance and the I or what Fichte elsewhere calls“life” (Fichte 1987, 111). Rather than directly refute the dogmatist, Fichteshows that she refutes herself. Insofar as positing the ground of experienceis a response to a normative demand, namely, the demand posed by the firsttask of philosophy, it is an act for which one is responsible. It is I who heedthis task as a task, and so stake my claim. But by positing the Not-I asground, the dogmatist posits a principle whose nihilistic entailment precludesher capacity to do so. A mode lacks the kind of responsibility that thedogmatist must assume in order to posit her first principle. Through aperformative contradiction, she belies her principle simply by positing it.

In this way, Fichte can dismiss the inconsistency between freedom and timeby imputing it to the dogmatic person’s confused act. He may then turn tovindicate idealism, which in the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo he does byinviting us to perform what we might call an act experiment. I can think the wall.I can also think myself thinking the wall. When I do, “the thinking subject andthe object of thought cannot be distinguished from each other in the way theycould be while I was still thinking about the wall [ … W]hen I think about theI my activity is self-reverting” (GA IV/2, 29). In thinking myself thinking, my actof thought is its own object. It is therefore not determined by an external cause,but is self-determining. Fichte calls our awareness of this free act an “intellec-tual intuition” (GA IV/2, 31) and since what it cognizes is the I, which is the firstprinciple of idealism, it demonstrates the truth of idealism.

Having removed the concept of pantheism and secured that of freedom,Fichte can now salvage the concept of time. For the sake of systematicity, herequires that this concept be deduced from idealism’s first principle, wherededuction consists in deriving a priori those conditions on which it is possible

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for the I to posit itself over against a world (see GA IV/2, 9). Like Hegel and, for abrief period, Schelling, Fichte refuses to consign time to brute forms of humansensibility, which confounds systematicity and yields Kant’s notoriousdistinction between what appears to these forms and what is in itself.Consequently, he must deduce time from the I.

One version of this deduction occurs in the Second Introduction of theNew Presentation. Fichte draws its first premise from a passage in Kant’sCritique of Pure Reason, which states that “it is the understanding which addsthe object to appearance, and it does this insofar as it connects the manifoldof appearance within a single consciousness”. Fichte’s second premise statesthat the object “exercises an effect only insofar as it exists”. Now, if thoughtcontributes the synthesis of the object’s very existence, so, too, must itcontribute the object’s capacity to exercise an effect—hence Fichte’s inferencethat the object “is only thought of” as exercising an effect. He then draws afurther inference:

Since this affection itself is only something we think of, then everything associated withthis affection [including, therefore, our own ability to be affected] is, undoubtedly, alsosomething that is only thought of […] And when you think that this is what occurs in thecase of every object you perceive, then you think of yourself as generally affectable. In otherwords, it is by means of this act of your own thinking that you ascribe receptivity orsensibility to yourself (SW I, 488).

If the existence and effect of any object are contributed by thinking, then thevery idea of affection derives from thought. And since thought does not merely“accompany a mechanism”, as Jacobi had feared, but is free by virtue of beinggrounded in the I, it is ultimately the I from which the idea of affection derives.Finally, since, for us, affection consists in sensibility, whose forms include spaceand time, we can say in particular that time derives from the I alone.

Fichte insists that this is Kant’s position as well—that it is the spirit, if notthe letter, of Kant’s view that my restriction by space and time occurs “as aconsequence” of my intellectual intuition of the I (SW I, 489). Another version ofFichte’s deduction of time, occurring in the Nova Methodo, makes its reliance onintellectual intuition more explicit. There, he says that intellectual intuition,

which does not occur in any time, is here extended to form a temporal series. Within everyheterogeneous manifold, this act of self-determination is posited over and over again; yetevery time it is posited, it is posited as the same single act of self-determination, and this isthe source of the continuity of the temporal series. I determine myself to move from A to B;this act of self-determination is an act that does not occur within any time. An experienceoccurs as a consequence of this act of self-determination; this transition from A to B occurswithin time. This movement of transition is conditioned by the causality of my will (GA IV/2, 130, emphasis added).



According to this deduction, it is my exercise of freedom that generates the time-phases of an action. As any action’s absolute ground is the free act of intellec-tual intuition, the “source of the continuity” of its time-phases must be singularrather than many. It is due to its singular grounding role that intellectualintuition cannot be said to occur at any particular time. This would be akin tothe category mistake of supposing that our entitlement to the pure concept ofcausality arises from any particular perception. The particular in each case isintelligible only by virtue of an a priori condition of possibility. Just as, for Kant,the experience of causation is only possible on condition of an act of under-standing, so, for Fichte, the experience of temporal duration is only possible oncondition of an act of freedom. Time is therefore a series generated by freedom.And as freedom is conceived in terms of the intellectual intuition of the I,idealism’s first principle must be the derivational source of the concept of time.

We may dispute Fichte’s claim to Kantian heritage on this point. However,by removing pantheism, Fichte is able to set freedom on an absolute footing,from which concepts like time can be taken in stride through systematic deduc-tions. Schelling’s objection, as we will see, is that the instigating dilemma ismerely apparent, for it rests on a misunderstanding of the concepts of panthe-ism, freedom, and time.

§2As early as 1795, Schelling offers a charitable assessment of the dogmatist,

which Fichte fails to consider. He defends a pluralist position in the “Letters” byarguing that intellectual intuition is a state that we could never inhabit—as iteffaces the difference between subject and object—and thus a state that couldnever provide cognition of the I, one consequence of which is that idealismcannot be vindicated over dogmatism (SW I/1, 325).4 On Schelling’s view, posit-ing a first principle instead enacts a decision, namely, to live in accord with aparticular system, one whose value is “subjective” in this sense and whosevalidity is to be sought practically (SW I/1, 312). It is for this reason that hecan espouse idealism with Fichte even while admiring “the calmness with whichSpinoza approached the completion of his system”, and can ask sincerely: “Whowould think any worse of [Spinoza’s] serene spirit for harbouring such an image,under which he found bearable the thought at which his system stopped?”(SW I/1, 316).5

4 For an account of Schelling’s pluralism in the “Letters”, see Bruno 2014.5 Compare Schelling: “the question as to which (abstract) principle could furnish the startingpoint for philosophy [ … is] unworthy of a free man who knows his own self”, who knows that“man was born to act, not to speculate, and that therefore his first step into philosophy mustmanifest the arrival of a free human being” (SW I/1, 242); and: “individual freedom is surely

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What is crucial is that Schelling’s early pluralism involves fundamentallyrethinking pantheism and freedom, a rethinking he elaborates in theFreiheitsschrift and Weltalter. In the former, he argues that Spinoza’s denial offreedomowes, not to his pantheism, but to his fatalism. It is clear from the followingpassage that, by “fatalism”, Schelling means what Jacobi understands as nihilism:

[Spinoza] treats the will also as a thing and then proves very naturally that it would have tobe determined in all its activity through another thing that is in turn determined byanother, and so on ad infinitum. Hence the lifelessness of his system, the sterility of itsform, the poverty of concepts […] hence his mechanistic view of nature follows quitenaturally as well. Or does one doubt that the basic view of Spinozism must already beessentially changed by a dynamic notion of nature? (SW I/7, 349)

Recall Jacobi’s definition of living beings: they are free because they contain aprinciple that guides their action, that is, because they have final causes.Spinoza rejects the very idea of final causation (Spinoza 2002, IApp), fromwhich, as Schelling says, it follows “very naturally” that any mode, includinga human will, must be determined by something other “ad infinitum”. The“poverty of concepts” in Spinoza’s system accordingly owes to the absence ofthe concept of a final cause, while its “sterility” owes to the absence of purpo-siveness. Schelling’s claim is that we “essentially” alter Spinoza’s pantheism byintroducing a non-fatalistic or “dynamic” conception of nature.6 The “lifeless-ness” of Spinoza’s pantheism, then, leaves open the possibility of a pantheism offreedom. Hence Schelling says: “That the fatalistic sense may be connected withpantheism is undeniable; but that this sense is not essentially connected with itis elucidated by the fact that so many people are brought to this viewpointthrough the most lively feeling of freedom” (SW I/7, 339). Our challenge is torethink pantheism as a system of nature that does justice to our feeling of

connected in some way with the world as a whole (regardless of whether it be thought in arealist or idealist manner)” (SW I/7, 337). Schelling’s pluralism presents certain difficulties, forSpinoza would agree neither that we have no knowledge of substance nor that his is a merelysubjectively valid system that must share logical space with the system of idealists. As a post-Kantian, however, Schelling can offer him no better than this: simply accepting the first lemmaas Jacobi and Fichte conceive it invites an unlivable nihilism.6 Compare Schelling: “others find the true archetype of pantheism in the doctrine of Spinoza.Spinoza deserves serious consideration. Far be it from us to deny in Spinoza that for which hewas our teacher and predecessor. Perhaps, of all the modern philosophers, there was inSpinoza a dark feeling of that primordial time of which we have attempted to conceptualizeso precisely [ … ] But he knows only the balance, but not the conflict that emerges out of theequipollence [ … ] Consequently, his substance, or the common being of [extension andthought], persists in an eternal, immobile, inactive parity [ … ] Hence the lack of life andprogression in his system” (SW I/8, 339-40).



freedom. A few years later, the Weltalter voices the existential difficulty of thischallenge: “[most people] would no doubt find real pantheism to be horrifying.But were they capable of penetrating the exterior surface of things, they wouldsee that the true prime matter of all life and existence is precisely what ishorrifying”, namely, our own “abyssal freedom” (SW I/8, 304, 339).

How, then, is freedom consistent with a system of nature? Schellingargues for this in four steps in the Freiheitsschrift: “Since no concept can bedefined in isolation […] and only proof of its connection with the whole alsoconfers on it final scientific completeness, this must be pre-eminently thecase with the concept of freedom, which, if it has reality at all, must not besimply a subordinate or subsidiary concept, but one of the system’s rulingcentre-points” (SW I/7, 336). The first premise states that the definition of aconcept must be holistic: it depends for its “scientific completeness” on itsrelation to all other concepts in a systematic “whole”. The second premisestates that this criterion applies to the concept of freedom. The third premisestates that this concept cannot stand in a “subordinate” relation to otherconcepts—the threat of nihilism reminds us why. It follows that freedommust stand in a grounding relation to all concepts within a system. AsSchelling says, freedom’s definition must be pre-eminent. It is not oneconcept among many, but the condition of the possibility of any system ofnature.7 In this way, according to Schelling, freedom is consistent withpantheism.

One might worry that Schelling sacrifices nature’s absoluteness by ground-ing the system of nature on human freedom. An insight from Iain HamiltonGrant’s lectures on the Freiheitsschrift shows us why “nature” and “freedom” arenot, in fact, competing terms.8 Consider that nature is not merely given to us. Ifit were, what would we be to receive it? And what would the giving be? Humanfreedom is not extra-natural: as agents, we are nature’s own autonomy. To balkat this is to miss that the Freiheitsschrift propounds a pantheism of freedom.Rather than viewing nature sideways on—a system of relations of necessity towhich freedom must be integrated subordinately and so, as the four-step argu-ment shows, per impossibile—Schelling conceives freedom as the active groundof nature. His aim is not to weave freedom into a pre-existing tapestry, but, toexploit Jacobi’s simile (Jacobi 1994, 509-10), to investigate the activity of

7 Compare Gabriel 2014: “The starting point of the Freedom Essay [ … ] is a conception ofthought and reference as full-fledged objects of freedom, as actions” (6).8 These lectures were given at the Pittsburgh Summer School in Contemporary Philosophy onSchelling’s Naturphilosophie at Duquesne University in August 2013.

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weaving itself. Such an activity is no more human than natural.9 This is why, inthe Freiheitsschrift, Schelling identifies the ground of God’s existence with “thewill of the understanding”, which is to say, the “human will” (SW I/7, 359,363).10 That which in us freely desires to comprehend relations of necessity innature is inseparable from this ground.11 Hence the Weltalter’s claim that “frometernity the necessary is subject to freedom” (SW I/8, 253).

By removing the tension between freedom and pantheism that gives Fichtethe impression of a dilemma, Schelling is able to dislodge Fichte’s conceptionof dogmatic evil and, as we will see in §4, to reconceive the same. But first wemust see how Schelling renders the concepts of freedom and pantheism con-sistent with that of time.

§3Schelling’s conception of freedom as human-all-too-natural should help to

explain, not only his identification of the ground of God’s existence with the willof human understanding, but also his claim in the third draft of the Weltalterthat “one who could write completely the history of their own life would alsohave […] concurrently grasped the history of the cosmos” (SW I/8, 207-8).Schelling’s conception of freedom can only help to explain this strange claimif we have the right notion of “history”, for to grasp my life’s complete empiricalhistory is surely to exclude the complete empirical history of the cosmos: thecontents of these histories are not concurrent. I will argue that Schelling’sconception of history in the Weltalter is not empirical, but transcendental—andit is here that the concept of time will turn out to be consistent with those ofpantheism and freedom.

Consider the distinctive priority of a transcendental condition. Such a con-dition is not empirically prior to the experience that it makes possible. Itprecedes experience, not at some moment, but as that without which experiencewould be impossible. Neither, however, is a transcendental condition logicallyprior to experience, for it is not necessary, according to general logic, thatanything should make experience possible. It is only given that we have acertain kind of experience and can investigate its possibility, under the aegis

9 Freedom’s essential openness, no more than its naturalness, guarantees the incompletenessof the totality we aim philosophically to grasp. See Gabriel 2014: “The idea of a complete map ofthe world is inconsistent because the appearance of the map as an event in the world alters it.The special ontological status of the concept of unrestricted totality is that it cannot be closed ifour reference to it belongs to it” (11).10 See Schelling: “human will is the seed—hidden in eternal yearning—of the God who ispresent still in the ground only” (SW I/7, 363).11 See Schelling: “Created out of the source of things and the same as it, the human soul isconscientious of creation” (SW I/8, 200, emphasis added).



of transcendental logic, that the conditions we discover have the kind of prioritythey do. Given both experience and transcendental logic, we find that transcen-dental conditions have the priority of that with respect to which experience isessentially belated. That is to say, experience is always already constituted bysuch conditions. This sheds light on Kant’s claim in the first Critique that thecategories are “ancestral concepts” (A13/B27, A81/B107).12 Rather than anempirical history, transcendental conditions comprise what we may call the“immemorial past”13 of experience, that is, its transcendental history.

Now, recall Schelling’s four-step argument in the Freiheitsschrift that free-dom grounds pantheism. In this argument, freedom precedes pantheism as itscondition of possibility. It follows that freedom precedes pantheism, not in time,but as that time with respect to which a system of nature is essentially belated.Freedom, in other words, is pantheism’s ancestral or immemorial past. As I willshow, the Weltalter develops precisely this conception of freedom as transcen-dental history—as that time which the third draft calls “a past that did not firstbecome past, but which was the past from the primordial beginning and sinceall eternity” (SW I/8, 254). To grasp this development, we must first traceSchelling’s motivation for a non-empirical conception of history, after whichwe must see why he conceives this time-before-time in terms of freedom.

In the second draft, Schelling says that if the past is one among qualitativelyidentical time-phases in a “chain of causes and effects”, we are left with a“mechanistic system”. Mechanism assumes the idea of empirical time, accordingto which the past is only quantitatively distinct from the present. It is, in otherwords, the nihilistic idea of a homogeneous series of moments linked by efficientcausation. To avoid this nihilistic consequence, Schelling implores us to “riseabove” empirical time so that we may grasp an “authentic past” (Schelling andŽižek 1997, 119-21). Avoiding mechanism requires us, in turn, to fill the expla-natory vacuum that it leaves. Hence Schelling’s rhetorical question of how wecould “recognize the present era without a science of the past” (Schelling andŽižek 1997, 121). The implication is that the “present era” is what we experienceand that this experience is unintelligible unless we discover its ground, whichminimally requires that we avoid mechanism, namely, by conceiving the past ina non-empirical register.

Schelling describes this non-empirical register in the third draft: “differenttimes (a concept that, like many others, has gotten lost in modern philosophy)

12 In contrast to a transcendental deduction of such ancestral concepts, Kant claims that anempirical deduction secures only an “ancestry from experiences” (A86/B119), whose conditionsof possibility the former deduction is meant to provide.13 Compare Levinas 1989, 84.

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can certainly be, as different, at the same time, nay, to speak more accurately, theyare necessarily at the same time […] What has past certainly cannot be as somethingpresent, but it must be as something past at the same time with the present” (SW I/8:302). Modern philosophy is misled by a one-sided conception of time, one thatyields the mechanistic view that the past is a momentary phase shifted along ahomogeneous causal chain and the nihilistic consequence that time precludesfreedom. We avoid this consequence by conceiving of a time that is not present,yet simultaneous with the present. This is precisely the temporality of a transcen-dental condition: while such a condition qua condition precedes what is present inexperience, the former cannot fail to coincide with the latter, namely, by condition-ing it. The empirical present is never without its transcendental history.

It is this transcendental history that Schelling has in mind when describingthe concurrence of life and cosmos. Autobiographical and cosmological historyare concurrent only insofar as they form one and the same transcendentalcondition of empirical history. Having traced Schelling’s motivation for conceiv-ing history in a non-empirical register, we can now see why he conceives thistime in terms of freedom.

We saw that, for Fichte, philosophy begins with intellectual intuition of thesole, correct first principle. I briefly noted Schelling’s argument in the “Letters”that intellectual intuition is an uninhabitable state that consequently affords nocognition at all.14 It follows from this argument that there can be no positionfrom which to determine that one’s principle is correct and another’s incorrect.As Schelling says in the Sixth Letter: “If we want to establish a system and,therefore, principles, we cannot do it except by an anticipation of the practicaldecision. We should not establish those principles unless our freedom hadalready decided about them” (SW I/1, 312-3). A system is not ventured by thosewho profess to cognize a first principle—which risks a kind of despotism15—butrather by those who freely decide to endorse it. Decision in this sense is theresolve to live a kind of life, whether Spinozistic or Fichtean. By deciding how tolive, one removes the opposition between these systems: decision (Entscheidung)removes the cision (Scheidung) that their opposition poses.16

14 On Schelling’s argument for the unlivability of intellectual intuition, see Bruno 2016.15 See Schelling: “for a spirit who has made himself free and who owes his philosophy only tohimself, nothing can be more unbearable than the despotism of narrow minds who cannottolerate another system beside their own” (SW I/1, 306); and compare: “Nothing could moreenrage a youthful and fiery sensibility, burning for the truth, than the intention of a teacher toprepare his audience for some one special or particular system, wishing in this way toemasculate them by underhandedly removing the freedom of inquiry” (SW II/3, 16).16 That the will is free “to be utterly one thing or the other” (SW I/8, 220) shows that it precedespredication. This is despite our paradoxical ability to predicate it with impredicability; see SW I/



Schelling describes this “cision” in the Weltalter as a “doubling of ourselves[…] in which there are two beings, a questioning being and an answering being”.In asking how to live, I am doubled: I put myself into question. One of theWeltalter’s innovations is to show that deciding this question is not done “con-sciously or through deliberation”. This is because “no one has chosen [their]character following reasoning or reflection. One did not consult oneself” (SW I/8, 304). Living as a Fichtean is grounded, not on conscious reflection, but onfree decision, that is, on a pre-conscious commitment to a way of life in whichmy autonomy is a foregone conclusion and, thus, an external question.17 I mayseek to recover this decisive commitment in conscious reflection by constructinga myth about absolute grounds, but this will always presuppose my convictionin a framework by virtue of which such a reflection has sense.18 It would bewrong to infer, however, that the non-conscious decision presupposed by con-sciousness must be irrational, as opposed to arational.19 Schelling’s claim issimply that we must recognize this presupposition as consciousness’ conditionof possibility, that is, as its transcendental past:

There is no dawning of consciousness (and precisely for this reason no consciousness)without positing something past. There is no consciousness without something that is atthe same time excluded […] That which in consciousness is simultaneously the excluded[…] can only be the unconscious. Hence, all consciousness is grounded on the unconsciousand, precisely in the dawning of consciousness, the unconscious is posited as the past ofconsciousness (SW I/8, 262).

7, 408. Compare Tritten 2012: “The unprethinkable is not equivalent to the unthinkable becauseit is indeed thinkable but only per posterius and not from the posterior. The unprethinkable doesnot preclude that it may be post-thinkable” (66). It is not obvious, then, that we mustdistinguish the will from the unground or indifference point (see Gabriel 2014).17 Fichte himself asserts that intellectual intuition “produces no consciousness, not even self-consciousness”, but “merely serves to put the I into a position in which self-consciousness—and, along with this, all other consciousness—becomes possible. But no actual consciousnesshas yet arisen at this point” (SW I, 459).18 See Schelling: “The decision that would make any kind of act into a true beginning may notbe brought before consciousness. It may not be recalled, which rightly means as much as takingit back. Whoever reserves it to themselves again and again to bring a decision to light nevermakes a beginning” (SW I/8, 314). Compare Nietzsche 1990: “[Philosophers] all act as if theyhad discovered and arrived at their genuine convictions through the self-development of a cold,pure, divinely insouciant dialectic [ … ] while what essentially happens is that they take aconjecture, a whim, an ‘inspiration’ or, more typically, they take some fervent wish that theyhave sifted through and made properly abstract—and they defend it with rationalizations afterthe fact” (8).19 See Gabriel 2009: “If the only way to confer meaning on statements is to blindly acceptcertain things, then this acceptance cannot be seen as an irrational shortcoming. It ratherenables rationality without itself being rational” (76).

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Unconsciousness is the time before consciousness, preceding yet simultaneous(“at the same time”) with it. Such a time, while empirically present, is transcen-dentally past. But as it is precisely one’s free decision that embodies thisunconscious time-before-time, we discover that the concept of freedom is con-sistent with the concept of time conceived at the transcendental register. As theconcept of freedom is already consistent with that of pantheism, we find aconsistent trio where Fichte had envisioned none. Indeed, we find a set ofconcepts whose members are mutually dependent.

We are now in a position to consider Schelling’s account of the role ofpersonality in this unity, an account that, I suggest, Fichte’s notion of a person-types unwittingly invites.

§4Like Fichte, Schelling invokes personality to solve a problem posed by a

specific set of concepts. For Fichte, we can discern two person-types for whomthis set is inconsistent: one that dogmatically rejects freedom and one thatidealistically rejects pantheism.20 By contrast, Schelling discerns a personalityfor whom this set is consistent, in line with the above-reconstructed arguments. Iwill conclude by showing how this difference between Fichte and Schellingtracks the latter’s distinction between good and evil in the Freiheitsschrift andhow the capacity for good and evil developed in that text reflects Schelling’sconception of personality during his middle period.

In the Freiheitsschrift, Schelling describes personality in terms of “the capa-city for good and evil” (SW I/7, 353, 364). An evil person “steps out from [her]being beyond nature in order, as general will, to make [herself] at once

20 It is perhaps more accurate to read Fichte’s dictum—the “kind of philosophy onechooses [ … ] depends on the kind of person one is” (SW I, 434)—as stating, not that onecan be either an idealistic or a dogmatic person, but that one’s personality is eitherauthentically or inauthentically idealist. In the New Presentation, he states: “The object ofidealism has an advantage [ … ] over that of dogmatism, for the former can be shown to bepresent within consciousness—not, to be sure, as the explanatory ground of experience, forthis would be contradictory and would transform this system into a portion of experience;yet it can still be shown to be present, as such, within consciousness. In contrast, the objectof dogmatism cannot be considered to be anything but a pure invention, which can be madeinto something real only by the success of this system” (SW I, 429). The dogmatist’s “object”or ground is a fiction because positing the Not-I is a normative and thus free response tophilosophy’s first task. She has no true object and therefore no philosophy. But if dogmatismis no philosophy and if one’s philosophy depends on one’s person-type, then one cannot bea dogmatic person, but rather a failed idealist. The dogmatist lives her freedom despiteherself—in bad faith. Fichte’s summons to posit the ground of experience sets a task that wecan fail to meet, in which case we express an inauthentic personality.



particular and creaturely” (SW I/7, 366). We saw that freedom, properly con-ceived, does not lie “beyond nature”, but is the decisive act that grounds thesystem of nature: nature, as we saw, has a transcendental past.21 The evil persondisowns her grounding role, paranoid that nature may be her responsibility.22

She takes refuge from this paranoia by viewing herself as “creaturely” ratherthan creative—as accidental rather than essential to the constitution of nature.23

In bad faith, she disavows the significance of her decision to live a kind of life.Thus, the Fichtean explains the vicissitudes of selfhood—contingency and mor-tality—in terms of the permanence of I-hood—necessity and immortality24—while the Spinozist explains the finitude and mutability of modes in terms ofthe infinitude and immutability of substance.

The evil person’s paranoia turns to hubris when, having disowned herrole as ground, she demands a crystal clear and impersonal insight into theground of experience, displaying what Schelling calls “arrogance” and“Fichtean impetuosity” (SW I/7, 360). The allusion here is to Fichte’s doctrineof intellectual intuition, an act whose form is alleged to depend on nothingparticular about any individual subject. Spinoza’s doctrine of intuitive knowl-edge likewise concerns cognition, not merely from the human subject’sperspective, but from the perspective of eternity.25 Regardless of her meta-philosophical disposition, the evil person claims as a particular will to speakfor the “general will”. She must accordingly renounce any consistency amongpantheism, freedom, and time: on the one hand, she is suspicious enough ofthe freedom of subjects to deny that it can ground the system of nature; onthe other hand, she is impetuous enough to demand an impersonal insightinto the ground of that system.26 The trio’s consistency is thus contingent on

21 As Henningfeld 2003 correctly observes, this transcendental past necessarily has its ownempirical present: “Als intelligible Tat darf die Entscheidung nicht in die Zeit fallen. DerGegenbegriff zu ‘Zeit’ ist ‘Ewigkeit’. Also muss es sich um eine ewige Tat handeln—aber dochso, dass sie in das zeitliche Sein hineinwirkt” (110). Like a transcendental condition without anempirical conditioned, a decision not enacted in time is an empty form. Thus, I manifest nocharacter, but at best a mere wish, in failing or refusing to venture a certain kind of life.22 See Schelling: “most people are frightened precisely by this abyssal freedom in the sameway that they are frightened by the necessity to be utterly one thing or another” (SW I/8, 304).23 Compare Fichte: “the only thing that exists is reason, and individuality is something merelyaccidental. Reason is the end and personality is the means [ … R]eason alone is eternal, whereasindividuality must ceaselessly die off” (SW I, 505).24 See Fichte 1987, 111, 122-3; SW I, 505; GA IV/2, 220.25 See Spinoza 2002, VP36.26 See Schelling: “The understanding is born in the genuine sense from that which is withoutunderstanding [ … ] The arrogance of man rises up against this origin from the ground and evenseeks moral reasons against it. Nevertheless we would know of nothing that could drive man

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the existence of a good personality, one that resists the oscillationbetween paranoia and hubris and exhibits what Schelling calls “temperance”(SW I/7, 371).

This raises a concern, for even if evil is a “misuse of freedom” (SW I/7,366), it is nevertheless as arbitrary as goodness. This is because humanfreedom is originally undecided. As the ground of the system of nature, itis “a wholly undetermined capacity to will one or the other of two contra-dictory opposites” (SW I/7, 382). A Kantian may object that this reduces thewill to the liberty of indifference, that is, the capacity for free choice orWillkür. The capacity to issue maxims of choice with indifference contrastswith Wille, the capacity to legislate one’s actions according to the moral law.Willkür, the Kantian will argue, is free only if it is determined by Wille, and isotherwise arbitrary (see AA 6, 226). The Schellingian, he will conclude, iswrong to hold that cognition, which practically consists in Wille, is groundedin a decision that amounts to sheer Willkür.

We can allay this worry by considering a passage from the Freiheitsschrift, inwhich Schelling denies that decision is tantamount to Willkür:

For the common concept of freedom, according to which freedom is posited as a whollyundetermined capacity to will one or the other of two contradictory opposites, withoutdetermining reasons but simply because it is willed, has in fact the original undecidednessof human being as idea in its favor; however, when applied to individual actions, it leadsto the greatest inconsistencies. To be able to decide for A or ~A without any compellingreasons would be […] a prerogative to act entirely irrationally and would not distinguishman […] from the well-known animal of Buridan (SW I/7, 382).

This passage distinguishes freedom as decision from freedom as Willkür.Unlike Willkür, decision does not express an “individual” action of whichwe might deny that it lacks “any compelling reasons”. This is because thedecision to live a kind of life enacts a general capacity for individual actions,actions that strive to exemplify that life. As Schelling says in the third draft ofthe Weltalter: “absolute freedom […] is not freedom for a particular deed”(SW I/8, 304). Freedom as decision is a pre-conscious commitment to aframework within which my deeds can be measured against my willed voca-tion. The “original undecidedness” of the will thus differs from Willkür as it isthe past on which this framework is grounded—the decision by virtue ofwhich my doing A (or ~A) can pose internal questions about which reasonsfor doing it are compelling. In other words, decision does not express a

more to strive for the light with all of his strength than the consciousness of the deep night fromwhich he has been lifted into existence” (SW I/7, 360).



specific course of action because it grounds what it means generally to take acourse of action, given some framework for living. For this same reason,decision is also not an expression of Wille, which itself presupposes one’sresolve to live a life of practical reason. Decision is instead the unprethink-able ground of both Willkür and Wille.27

Here, the Kantian may find an unexpected ally, for it is Kant who, in theConcluding Remark to the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, acknowl-edges that the “necessity” of the moral law’s normative force on us isincomprehensible.28 As the moral law is not an exceptionless law of nature,but a law of action that, as we show in cases of self-conceit, we can trans-gress, the necessity of its normative force is inscrutable. Schelling locates theunprethinkable freedom of decision at precisely this site of inscrutability: thenormative force of deciding on a kind of life, since it cannot be deliberative,is incomprehensible. He can thus be read as radicalizing Kant’s view that thequestion “what is the human” is deeper than any question about what wecan know, what we ought to do, or for what we may hope.29 Like Kant,Schelling sees that facts are always already conceptual and so bound up withtranscendental conditions. Deepening Kant’s position, he also sees that suchconditions are always already willed and so bound up with a kind of person.Nature’s deepest question lies here.

References

Bruno, G. Anthony (2016). “‘As From a State of Death’: Schelling’s Idealism asMortalism” in Comparative and Continental Philosophy 8.3:288-301.Bruno, G. Anthony (2014). “Freedom and Pluralism in Schelling’s Critique ofFichte’s Jena Wissenschaftslehre” in Idealistic Studies, 43.1:81-102.Fichte, J.G. (2005). The System of Ethics. Trs. and eds. G. Zöller and D. Breazeale.

27 On Schelling’s resistance to Kant’s practical philosophy, see Kosch 2006, 97-8.28 See Kant: “It is therefore no censure of our deduction of the supreme principle of morality,but a reproach that must be brought against human reason in general, that it cannot makecomprehensible as regards its absolute necessity an unconditional practical law (such as thecategorical imperative must be); for, that it is unwilling to do this through a condition—namelyby means of some interest laid down as a basis—cannot be held against it, since then it wouldnot be the moral law, that is, the supreme law of freedom. And thus we do not indeedcomprehend the practical unconditional necessity of the moral imperative, but we neverthelesscomprehend its incomprehensibility; and this is all that can fairly be required of a philosophythat strives in its principles to the very boundary of human reason” (AA 4, 463).29 See Kant AA 9, 25. Compare Schelling: “it is man himself that is the most incomprehensible”(SW II/3, 7).

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